AH: How quickly we use and pollute the bounty of the Earth Regarding Stephanie Salter's "Planet Birth: Soon, 6 billion of us" and Mike Scott's "Too many babies on board" (both Opinion Page, April 15) and your editorial about pollution and SUVs ( "Gag the big polluters," April 15): We are just like the boiling frogs - slowly boiling in our own mess and we absolutely refuse to look out from the sand in which we've buried ourselves.

Sport utility vehicles (SUVs) are symbolic of our denial. How can we forget the oil crisis of the late '70s and the realization that resulted? How can we deny the severe degradation of our global health and the real consequences of our behavior? How can a company like Ford buy time on public television and tell us how they are environmentally friendly and then announce their new product - the largest and worst gas-mileage SUV on the planet. How can another car company, Cadillac, tell us to

"live life without limits" ?

This is clearly insane. Just imagine if everyone on our Earth wasted, polluted, drove, jailed and consumed, just like us. When my children (in their teens) are a few years younger than my parents (in their mid-70s), there will be 11 billion of us.

When I was born in 1947, there were 2 billion of us. We are living in a fantasy world that is completely unsustainable and we are screwing it up for our own children and grandchildren. I'm a believer in the potential for our species - we are capable of many amazing things. But instead we have chosen a way of life that is devoid of deep human relationships, that is hellbent on enormous levels of consumption and destruction and that values the building of jails instead of schools and minds.

We have become a time-impoverished society completely caught up with material madness. We've lost our way and so many of us don't even know it. SUVs and other human craziness have got to stop if we have any regard for our childrens' future.

Is anyone thinking about even the next two generations? (How about 10 or 20?) Whether we realize it or not we are stewards of our Earth and our children. As Chief Seattle so eloquently said 100 years ago, "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We are merely borrowing it from our children." Wendell Berry says it so simply, "It's how we live our lives." Elliot Hoffman San Francisco

The editorial "Gag the big polluters" (April 15), regarding new government regulation of the emissions and fuel consumption performance of sport utility vehicles, failed to point out that just such legislation that aided in creating the burgeoning popularity of this class of vehicles in the first place.

Voluminous standards for government-designated passenger cars created a small, light-weight, extremely streamlined and low-to-the-ground genre of modern car. The result was the demise of the traditional family station wagon.

Many motorists found they could not conveniently carry an active suburban family and all their required paraphernalia in this regulation-inspired vehicle. Some modern low-fuel-consumption, low-emission econo-boxes won't even accommodate four reasonably sized adults unless they contort themselves into the shapes of pretzels.

As a result, many motorists opted for practical and commodious SUVs where one can sit at a reasonable height above the road. SUV drivers also desired the larger and heavier-is-safer aspect of a more robust sport utility instead of the downscaled passenger car.

Except for its height, the size and weight of an average new SUV is no larger or heavier than the American standard family vehicle of 30 to 40 years ago. While progress can be made in the emissions and fuel mileage of SUVs, regulations that are too onerous will only force the creation of a type of vehicle that no longer satisfies the marketplace, just as current legislation has done to the passenger car for much of the buying public. John F. Quilter Brisbane

Enforce laws for bikes

Thanks for your interesting coverage on bicycle commuters ( "Cyclists put mettle to the pedal in S.F.," April 15). However, it did not touch on a few important points.

All bike owners should be required to register and insure their bicycles as other vehicular owners are required to do. Also, they should be compelled by law to adhere to regular traffic and safety laws.

We all know many bicyclists ignore speed limits, stop signs, traffic lights, etc., jeopardizing themselves, motorists and pedestrians. Often they travel at night without lights.

Enforced laws and registration on all bicycles will help pay for the extra signs and lanes needed for bicyclists to operate safely in The City and elsewhere. Robert Clutton San Francisco

Inventive question

In the article "Bay Area's sacred scientific sites" (April 16), Keay Davidson writes, "There (at the old Federal Telegraph Co. in Palo Alto), in 1911-1913 inventor Lee De Forest and two associates developed the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator."

De Forest actually invented the vacuum tube amplifier in 1906 in New York, and he had no part in the development of the oscillator. That honor belongs to Edwin Howard Armstrong, who patented the device in 1913 but subsequently lost title to it due to a ludicrous, yet legally successful, claim by De Forest to have previously developed it in in 1912.

This tragic injustice occurred in spite of the fact that the great majority of radio engineers, the U.S. attorney general, members of the Patent Office and several knowledgeable appeals court justices strongly supported Armstrong.

Hopefully, before we reach the 100th anniversary of Armstrong's invention, the record can be set straight once and for all. A fine reference work documenting Armstrong's Herculean contributions to electronics is Tom Lewis' book, "Empire of the Air." John Lindon Berkeley

Dole's reliance on military

Elizabeth Dole's article, "Best answers now will come from military might" (Opinion Page, April 14), comes so close yet misses the point on U.S. "involvement" in Kosovo. She rightly acknowledges that the citizens of our country have a tremendous capacity to give and to help

"so that others may live and reclaim their dignity as members of the human race." How can she reconcile this with her statement that our best answers to the Serbian oppression will come through our military might?

How much better would the Balkans be, Kosovars, Albanians, Serbs and Macedonians, if the U.S. had decided to follow a path of constructive engagement, as we do with so many other countries run by dictators equally guilty of human rights abuses and equally bent on expanding their territory? China comes immediately to mind.

Perhaps now our best response would be to divert some of the funds being spent on bombs and troops to food, clothing and refugee assistance workers for the thousands who have fled not only Serbian aggressors but also NATO's destruction of their homes and country. Let us make a commitment to strengthen peacemaking efforts in Yugoslavia. Robin Mohr San Francisco&lt;